I was watching a cartoon of Hanuman with my son when a funny thing struck me. If we take the examples of Hindu mythology or Greek, Norse or any other one, we’d realise that in most cases there have been a tenedency to stereotype genius.
Take the examples of the most glorified ones say Hanuman or Thor or Persius. All of them have been strong, energetic, genius in learning, knowing and understanding in the way that our society sees fit.
But, in this one-sided outlook of ours when somebody like Einstein, Edison, Mozart, van Gogh comes along we start looking at that person with our stereotypical outlook. The person inevitably goes through a lot of trauma because of that and in most cases never recovers from it. We tag that person as an ‘useless’ life because of the fact that they are maybe a lot different to the ones seen as geniuses. We, as a society make the Hanumans, Thors and Persiuses the benchmark for everybody to follow whereas the ‘other’ geniuses are left to fight it on their own to prove their worth. Many do get lost and subsequently destroyed in that.
Take the example of Bhakt Prahlad as well. His own father used to despise him as Prahlad couldn’t project himself like the epitome of strength, might and so on like his father wanted him to. There are many examples like that.
Now, Hanuman and the others were great for sure. No doubt about that. I don’t know much about Thor or Persius but Hanuman was really the benchmark of everything a human can think of. His biggest attribute was his devotion to Lord Ram though.
Coming back to the topic, the question is, why does this stereotyping happen? And how do we stop it from happening?
Well, It happens because of our ignorance to be honest. And where does ignorance come from? Lack of spirituality for sure. Spirituality teaches us how the universal law doesn’t stereotype anything. Every moment newer things are happening which have it’s own way of expressing itself.
The Universal law doesn’t bind us to any particularity. And spirituality will give us the understanding of accepting that fact. It will give us the understanding to listen, think, wait before passing a judgement.
As Swami Vivekananda had said, ‘If you understand Religion (Universal Religion or Spirituality) truly then you won’t step inside a church, mosque or a temple again.’ This means that spirituality is within us and only we can break the barrier of ignorance and stereotype with it’s regular practice. Many of us go to mosques, churches and temples thinking we’ll find God/Self there only and not anywhere else which most of the times consolidates the stereotypical thought that I mentioned about. But once we start understanding spirituality then we start looking at everything from a higher plane of existence.
Om Shanti….?